My new Schacht Baby Wolf did finally arrive! It has taken me forever to actually set it up because when it arrived it came direct from the factory and smelled like raw lumber.

Lumber is a major migraine trigger for me and I really couldn’t get close enough to it to fully even unbox it. The only room it fits in is the living room so that has been challenging.

Someone told me that got wood smell out of a new dresser by filling the drawers with coffee beans. That’s not really an option with the loom so I instead filled a cotton produce bag with beans and hung it from the top beam. The smell started to go away pretty quickly but it took over a month to be faint enough I could actually handle it.

I never dreamed it would be so stinky! Even unfinished IKEA furniture doesn’t smell this strongly. I guess since it shipped here straight from the warehouse it never aired out?

The directions were pretty easy to follow. I do wish they were a little more detailed and gave some more reasoning behind what you are doing. One end of the heddles were red and greasy so I assumed that meant they went on top but I don’t know. They were on tiny thin threads and one set wasn’t connected so that was a little tedious to thread on. There does seem to be a tiny difference between the “front” and “back” of each heddle but all the directions was to slide them on the bar. The video they direct you to is 10 years old and the heddles are not packaged the same. The video for the apron rod they tell you to watch is for the Cricket rigid heddle. How hard is it to update the videos or film 5 minutes on one of the Wolf looms? I just wanted to make sure it didn’t matter which way you looped them on.

One of the fold knobs arrived really loose and fell off. In the directions they just tell you to be careful with them or the whole loom will collapse. Not how to reattach them. Let’s just say it involved using a key to hook the hole the screw was supposed to go in and some mild panic to hold it all together.

I think it comes with an extra apron rod? I have three. The packing slip included rubber o-rings but there weren’t any in the box and I never found instructions that included them so I’m going to assume they weren’t actually needed. They said discard some from the jack pins so maybe they were supposed to replace them if you wanted to secure it again for transport? Or something? I don’t see anywhere on the loom they’d go.

I’m excited to finally get weaving! It really has been a more stressful and drawn out process than I’d expect. It does still smell a little bit it’s manageable.